


Invite Only

by downjune



Category: Mission: Impossible (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Demons, Blood, Consent Issues, Extra Trick, Free to a good home, Gen, M/M, Movie: Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, Possession, Pre-Slash, Trick or Treat: Trick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-07
Updated: 2019-11-07
Packaged: 2021-01-24 14:42:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21339916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/downjune/pseuds/downjune
Summary: In order for a demon to fully inhabit a body, it needed an invite. In order to take a body, it only needed a road.orMission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, but with demons.
Relationships: Benji Dunn & Ethan Hunt, Benji Dunn/Ethan Hunt
Comments: 3
Kudos: 53
Collections: Trick or Treat Exchange 2019





	Invite Only

**Author's Note:**

> I've been itching to write in this fandom since I finished the movies recently, and ToT seemed like as good a time as any! 
> 
> This dumps you right in the middle of the movie, after Ethan loses Ilsa in Morroco. So, spoilers ahead.

Ilsa Faust was a demon. 

“Ethan, she’s a demon. We trusted her to get us to Lane—incidentally, also a demon—and the one thing you’re never supposed to do is trust a demon. She burned us because that’s what demons do.” Benji knew that Ethan knew this, of course, but sometimes repetition was all he had.

“Stop saying ‘demon,’” Ethan answered, distractedly. He gripped the back of Benji’s chair, knuckles digging into his shoulder blades. “Can you access the disk or not?”

“No, and neither can she.” Benji sat back in the chair, away from the laptop, and Ethan straightened. Benji twisted around to look up at him. “Neither can Lane. It’s a red box. No one can access it, ever, unless they can get inside the Prime Minister of England, which, as demons, they are both capable of doing.”

“We can assume that’s what Lane wants,” Brandt chimed in. “We have to alert the British government.”

Ethan frowned and shook his head, which in Benji’s experience, meant he had no intention of doing what Brandt wanted. In fairness, though, Ethan rarely did what Brandt wanted. “We have to get there first. We have to _get Lane_ first. And Ilsa will help us.”

“Ilsa will help Ilsa,” Brandt snapped. “Lane’s got her on a leash. He probably has her in a contract you can’t break. Hell, MI6 may too.”

“All the more reason for her to help us. She wants out,” Ethan said.

“Even if she did want to, she may not be able to.”

Benji let Brandt say what they were all thinking and watched Ethan instead. He would find Ilsa and help her _and_ get Lane because Ethan was incapable of letting anyone on his team go for the greater good. Benji and Brandt and Luther might argue against the addition of Ilsa Faust to the team, but they would be too late. Ilsa was Ethan’s, just like they all were.

“We’re going to London,” Ethan said with finality.

Benji started packing up.

*

The thing about demons—they weren’t born. They were made. Separating a soul from a body gave the maker tremendous power. The demon could become anyone, go anywhere at the behest of their maker. They could live forever. Demons nearly always outlived their makers, and when the knowledge of their making was forgotten, they were free. 

Solomon Lane did not appear to have a maker, and if Benji was any judge, he was as old as evil itself. Ilsa Faust, on the other hand, was cooked up in the bowels of MI6, and Ethan should have seen it from the beginning. They all should have done.

Also on the list of things they should’ve seen from the beginning: Lane would use the weakest of Ethan’s team against him, and Benji was the weakest.

He came around zip-tied to a chair with the face of evil about arms-width from his own. This body certainly wasn’t Lane’s first, and it showed the typical signs of wear, his skin stretching over his cheekbones and hanging off his chin in a way that made Benji’s stomach hurt. He wanted desperately to look away and couldn’t. 

“You and I are going to get that disk,” Lane said, and his voice slid out of his throat like it didn’t belong there, either. Wrong voice or wrong throat, Benji couldn’t decide which.

Benji looked into the icy blue of Lane’s eyes and understood exactly what he was for. He tugged uselessly at the ties securing him to the chair and was almost relieved there was no point begging. At least he didn’t have to worry he’d humiliate himself. Lane’s mouth twitched, as if he could already hear Benji’s hamster-wheel thoughts.

“Get him ready,” he said.

*

In order for a demon to fully inhabit a body, aside from its original one, it must be invited. Otherwise, a single body could get a little cramped with two souls squeezed inside its skin, both fighting for control over muscle and breath and brain-space. The demon always won, of course, and when it chose to leave the body it’d conquered, there was usually nothing left of the original inhabitant’s soul. It leeched away in sweat and tears—the only visible evidence of the conquest.

Benji breathed deeply through his nose and tried to remember his training. Tried not to piss himself in terror. And gripped the arms of the chair like he could physically hold onto his faith in his team. Ethan would find a way, because Ethan always found a way. Ethan would find a way because Ethan _always_ found a way. Ethan would _find_—

Benji squeezed his eyes shut as Lane knelt before him. Benji’s shoes and socks had been removed in preparation, the subdural anti-possession ward at the side of his neck dug out with razor blade and forceps. The tickle of the knife point against the arch of his right foot shot sparking sensation through his nervous system.

In order for a demon to fully inhabit a body, it needed an invite. In order to take a body, it only needed a road. 

Lane sliced into the bottom of Benji’s right foot, the blade so sharp, the pain didn’t register until he moved to the left. 

Benji inhaled sharply and managed to choke back the ugly sound that wanted out of his throat. He opened his eyes, even though he didn’t want to watch this, didn’t want to know the intimate details of how this worked. He was a curious bastard by nature, though, and he’d never witnessed a possession first-hand before.

His blood dripped steadily onto the tile floor, and when Lane judged there to be enough, he pressed both Benji’s feet into the twin pools so that two smudged footprints were left behind. Lane breathed in suddenly and deeply, inflating his chest again and again like he was about to dive, and before he could think on it, Benji found himself doing the same thing, whether by instinct or compulsion, he didn’t know.

With his blood full of oxygen and his body full of panic, everything came into sharp focus around him, just as Lane...blurred. His edges softened the way Ilsa’s had when she’d hit Ethan with the defib in Morocco. Except instead of coming into focus again like after she’d brought him back, Lane separated further from himself. He diverged until there were two of him. One of him, eyes as black as ink, stepped forward to place both feet on the bloody footprints. The other toppled in a heap.

The moment Lane stepped into Benji’s footprints, the soles of Benji’s feet burned. Very shortly after, so did the rest of him.

*

The only way to survive possession was not to fight it. No, strike that. The only way to survive possession was to expel the demon as soon as fucking possible, but the odds of surviving _that_ greatly increased if the victim played dead and didn’t fight the occupation of their own body. That’s what he was taught, anyway, so that's what he tried to do.

But Benji couldn’t un-see what Lane saw, couldn’t block out the sound of Lane using his voice to speak to Ethan. 

“This is the end, Mr. Hunt. Give me the disk or I destroy this body beyond all repair.”

Benji sat across from Ethan at an upscale London bistro and could only watch, a spectator in his own body. 

“It won’t just be your friend I destroy.” Lane swept Benji’s hand to encompass Ethan, the bistro, and its customers. “I’ll have him kill you first and all these people next.” And he would do it. The power occupying Benji’s body held near-infinite possibility.

At least his feet had stopped hurting. No sooner had Lane pushed his way inside, stinking like burnt fuel, than the slices in Benji’s feet vanished like they’d never been there. Lane’s first test of his control over his new body had been to sit down and wipe the blood off the soles of his feet. Benji had—well, he’d observed it as though through a plastic bag. Perfectly clear and perfectly sealed away like shrink-wrapped meat. Suffocated.

If he thought about it at all, blind, animal panic seized him. But if he thrashed and fought for space and breath, he used up what little he had. And Lane liked that. Lane felt every twitch Benji’s soul made against his own, and with every frantic motion, he leached further in, strengthening his grip.

If Benji held very still, though, he could breathe, or at least forget that he couldn’t. He could think. He could wait. And hope.

Next to him at their table, Ilsa watched him and saw only Lane, fear showing in the whites of her eyes. 

Ethan looked at him and _saw_ him. He stared right through Lane to where Benji was buried. Ethan’s eyes were a lifeline. He glanced down long enough to scribble something on a napkin, then held it up—an account number.

“You like bargains, right? Here’s $50,000,000 to let Benji go. Let him go.”

From the contact lens and earpiece connecting them to Lane’s Syndicate agents, they got confirmation that the account was real. The money had transferred.

“Where is the disk?” Lane asked again.

Ethan’s smile was razor-sharp. “You’re looking at it. I memorized all 2.6 billion in numbered accounts. I am the disk. And without that money, you’re nothing. Without me, you’re nothing. You want it, the Bone Doctor will have to _beat_ it out of me.” 

He slammed his hand on the table, and Lane flinched against Benji, dislodging slightly. 

“Let him go, Lane. It’s me you’re after. Just me. Ilsa—” Ethan twitched his chin, and she pressed her gun to his ribs, out of sight of the other bistro customers. Benji recognized the angle—through the armpit to his heart. “Shoot me if he doesn’t let Benji go or if any of his thugs take a step closer.” Ethan lifted his gaze to the agents circling the patio.

Lane raged. Not to Ethan, of course. He shifted inside Benji and instead of fire and smoke, he was made of talons. He clawed and scraped at Benji’s body, lighting up every pain receptor so that when Benji cried out, it was his own voice that came out of his throat. _I will take him, and I will be back for you, and I will make him watch what I do to you._ The demon's voice hurt the same way the rest of it hurt—relentlessly and inescapably. But the power that had held him violently released him and tore the shit out of him in a great, terrifying rush.

Lane poured free, and he was messier on the way out than in. Benji gagged, and something like thick, greasy smoke vomited out—from his mouth, eyes, and nose. From his pores. Lane turned him inside out and left him a hollow, gasping, wreck. He collapsed forward against the table, and all around them, people screamed and fled the noxious cloud of demon circling above them, but a hand like iron clamped around Benji's forearm and brought him out of his tailspin. Benji raised his head to see Ethan regarding him with that same intense stare.

He had a phone in his hand, pressed against Benji’s arm, so Benji shifted in Ethan’s grip and the phone slid into his palm.

“Go,” Ethan said. “The others are waiting for you.”

Not trusting his voice or his legs to carry him, Benji pressed upright and stood, anyway. His feet stung like he’d had knives in them, and his socks stuck in his shoes. 

“Thank you,” he managed, though his voice was a disaster.

Ethan’s chin twitched in a nod, and his mouth quirked in a smile, his eyes softening for a moment, before Ilsa grabbed his arm. “We have to go,” she said. 

And they did, fading into the disbursing crowd like they were smoke, too.

*

Benji limped to his rendezvous with Brandt and Luther and sat the hell down before he fell down while they set the final trap. He’d trapped demons before—they all had—but he couldn’t stomach this one. He watched as they etched in the final characters and spoke the words to set it, and felt only cold emptiness. He hugged his coat more tightly around himself and shivered into it. He couldn’t say for certain whether he was starving or if he never wanted to touch a piece of food for the rest of his days. He felt damaged.

Before any time had passed at all, though, a commotion from above alerted them they’d reached endgame. 

Ethan plummeted into the trap first, about as beaten and bloodied as Benji had come to expect by this stage of events. He landed in a heap and didn’t get up, and Benji’s already tetchy stomach tightened. Lane dropped through next, back in his “own” body, though it’d clearly been a rush job. Benji knew the shape of him now—knew his edges—and he was hanging on by his fingertips, blurring in and out of alignment with himself.

“Ethan, get out of there,” Benji said under his breath. “Ethan, get up.” 

Lane glared bloody murder into the shadows of the garage, but Benji and the rest stayed out of sight. Then he reached down and hauled Ethan up by the collar of his jacket. “You think you’ve won,” he gritted. “But I’ll do just what I did to your funny little friend. You’re coming home with me, Mr. Hunt.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” Ethan gasped out. “Other than a prison cell.”

Lane snarled and threw him. Literally threw him. Benji knew the terrible power in that body.

But Ethan came up against what may as well have been a glass wall and dropped to the ground. He dropped right at the edge of the trap carved into the underside of the sheet of plywood both he and Lane had landed on.

Benji squinted. 

“What is this?” Lane hissed. 

Ethan pressed up to his knees, looked right at Benji where he’d hidden himself, and tried to scramble out of the trap. 

He was halted just as suddenly as before. 

His eyes bulged and his lungs heaved as he tried again and was brought up short again. 

“No,” Benji said, climbing painfully to his feet. 

Ethan was not used to this kind of failure. His plans always worked out in the end, and this one should have been no different. They had Lane in a box, right where Ethan wanted him. Only the box had Ethan in it, too. 

Lane was laughing. He yanked Ethan back to his feet and slammed him against the invisible wall of the trap. Ethan raised his hands to protect himself, but Lane had him. He beat Ethan against what appeared to be nothing at all until Luther, Brandt, and Ilsa had all emerged from the shadows to stand, open-mouthed at the trap they’d sprung. They couldn’t get Ethan out without breaking the trap, releasing Lane in the process.

As if reading their minds, Ethan spoke, his voice slow ans wet. “Don’t you dare let us out. Finish the mission.”

Lane only laughed louder and hit him harder. And before Benji’s eyes, Ethan’s edges began to blur and diverge as Lane beat his body. He was a demon. Difficult to deny that with the evidence staring them all in the face. Had he always been one or was he occupied territory like Benji had been?

No. For as long as Benji had known him, Ethan was Ethan. 

And Ethan was a demon. 

How the hell had he not recognized it sooner? Ethan did the impossible every day—turned defeat into victory the way no other agent could. He was drawn to Ilsa like they were twins. And they were, made in a shadowy corner of a government agency. Made to serve until they were destroyed or forgotten. 

How had Benji ever thought Ethan a mere human man?

He was making very human noises now. Sounds of pain and anger and fear. Demons could be killed in their original bodies. Lane could—he could—

Benji stepped out of his hiding place. His heart pounded as he entered the ring of dim light surrounding the trap. 

There was no way to get a demon out of a trap without breaking it. That was their training. But that was for demons they very much wanted to keep in traps. 

“Ethan,” he said.

“Benji, whatever you’re thinking, don’t.”

“Ethan, I invite you in. _I invite you in._” At his words, Ethan spun around to stare at him. Only, he didn’t. Or—part of him did. He’d diverged into two, but he overlapped so much that it was like he had a face on the back of his head as well as his front. “I invite you in,” Benji repeated, heart in his throat.

“_No_,” Lane bit out, his hands locked around Ethan’s throat. Except it was only a body he had hold of, sliding down the side of the trap as the rest of Ethan slipped free. His eyes were black as ink, unblinking and unwavering from Benji’s as he crossed out of the trap.

“I don’t know how,” he said quietly, approaching on silent feet. He stopped just in front of Benji, blurry and indistinct, yet completely himself—bloody, unbowed, and brilliant. 

“Sure, you do,” Benji answered, and took an unsteady breath, inhaling deeply before the dive. Ethan searched his face with the kindest expression Benji had ever seen on anyone, demon or human. Then he closed his eyes and put both his hands on the backs of Benji’s arms. He drifted slowly to his knees, his grip sliding down to clasp Benji’s hands. As he lowered himself to the ground, he grew even more indistinct, until his knees touched the floor of the garage, and he’d faded completely. 

Benji inhaled again, and it tasted like the clove cigarettes he’d smoked at university—sharp and sweet and heady. He swayed on his feet but Ethan caught him.

“Pull him out!” Ilsa said urgently, and Brandt tossed her his gun as he and Luther sprang forward to grab Ethan’s body out of the trap. She trained the gun on Lane, but he didn’t resist. Even though Benji couldn’t seem to direct his awareness anywhere but inward, he felt Lane’s eyes on them, hungry. Ravenous.

“I’ve got you.” Benji couldn’t be certain who’d said it, himself or Ethan. He took a step toward Lane, where Brandt and Ilsa and Luther secured the walls of an actual glass box around him. Right where Ethan wanted him. He turned on the gas, because that was supposed to be Benji’s job, and he could swear with his hand on the valve, he felt Ethan’s fingers slotted between his.

*

So, to be clear. Possession via invitation—way different. Whether it was the invitation itself or Ethan himself, Benji couldn’t be arsed to determine. He was very tired. 

“You know, you shouldn’t leave that for too long,” Ilsa told them, pointing at Ethan’s body where it slumped over a duffle on the floor of the military plane airlifting them all back to the states.

“He’s comfortable,” Benji said with confidence. The body was breathing and everything, a sure sign that it was Ethan’s first and only. 

“I don’t blame you for wanting to hang onto this moment,” Ilsa said quietly. “Any one of us would give anything for what you offered Ethan.” She searched Benji’s face, obviously looking for him. “Even someone like Lane,” she said, almost to herself.

“When did you know?” Ethan asked with Benji’s voice.

Ilsa recognized the change immediately. “The moment everyone else did, I expect—the moment you did,” she answered with a twist of her mouth.

“No, I mean, about yourself. When did you know what you were?”

Her gaze clouded, turned inward. “I've always known what I was. They made sure to tell me exactly what I was for.”

Ethan reached for her hand and squeezed. He’d offered to help her run, but where could she go? MI6 had made her, and even if Atlee went down for his role in creating Solomon Lane and the Syndicate, the agency’s memory was long. It would hold power over her for a long while yet.

Ethan’s turmoil over his own origins eddied and swirled inside Benji when he couldn’t keep a lid on it. The sadness in Ilsa’s eyes brought it all rushing back. 

“Get some rest,” she advised. “You’re both going to need it.”

*

When they’d settled in for the rest of the flight to DC, Ethan left him as easily and painlessly as one breath into the next, and because he was Ethan, he left Benji in considerably better shape than he’d found him, smoothing way some of the damage Lane had done. 

Because he was Benji, and he followed Ethan into explosions and car chases and off the sides of buildings, he trailed after the blurry shape of him as he made his way back to his body. Benji slid down to sit by Ethan’s head as his chest rose on a sharp inhale and his eyelids fluttered open. 

“All right?” Benji asked quietly, and Ethan craned back to look at him. He nodded and relaxed against the duffle, a smile pulling at the corners of his mouth. 

“I think so. How do I look?”

Benji touched his shoulder, squeezed the swell of muscle and slid his hand to Ethan’s chest, where he felt the steady thump of his heart through his ribs. He just managed not to jump out of his skin—as it were—when Ethan covered his hand with his own and held it there.

“Like yourself,” Benji answered with a smile. “Thank you for saving my life. Again.”

“Thanks for saving mine,” Ethan said with characteristic sincerity. “Thanks for pulling me out of there.”

“Well, Lane left a disgusting taste in my…everything, so. You were a palate-cleanser, really.”

Ethan huffed a laugh and squeezed Benji’s hand hard enough that it hurt. They may as well have been alone in the belly of the plane for all Benji could think about any of the others right then. 

“I’m sorry, Ethan. I’m sorry you had to find out like that—about everything.”

Ethan shook his head and twitched a shrug, gaze turning inward just as Ilsa’s had done, like he was feeling out the shape of himself. “I’ve always… I’ve always known where to aim, where to look. How to do what needed to be done. I’ve always been able to make myself whatever I needed to be. Just like Ilsa. Like Lane.”

“No.” Benji was sure of this one, at least. “You’re nothing like him.”

Ethan shot him another look from where he lay, uneasy in his skin for perhaps the first time Benji'd ever seen. “I might have been. The more I think about my life—the more I think the IMF have been trying to keep me from becoming like him. I met Julia at just the right time, and she kept me…she changed the way I did my job. The way I looked at the world. She made me better. What if they put her there? In my way.” He looked up at Benji. “And when it wasn’t safe for her anymore, were you next?”

Benji wasn't sure where Ethan would take this line of reasoning. If Benji had just found out his life was a complex manipulation to keep him loyal to a shadowy government agency, he might harbor some resentment. To say the least. He tried to stay quiet about that last bit, but—

“I—feel I should clarify,” he blurted. “If the IMF put me in your way, I didn’t know. I just always liked working with you. I just like you.”

Ethan’s teeth flashed in a grin. “I know.” But it disappeared just as quickly. “Benji, I—I can’t do what I did to Julia to anyone else. I can’t have a family. I can’t have anybody outside this job. It’s not even—Lane _knew_ to take you.”

“In fairness, I was low-hanging fruit.”

“No, he knew exactly how to get to me.”

Benji frowned. “What are you saying, then? That to protect me, we can’t work together? Because honestly, I’ve got a better chance of coming through on your team than any other. You said it yourself—you always know where to aim.”

“No, I have to work with you,” Ethan said sharply. “Don't you get it—you make me better.”

Benji dropped his gaze, heat flooding his face. He hadn’t missed that Ethan had said his name in nearly the same breath as his wife's, but even more importantly, Ethan trusted him. Ethan trusted him to be good enough and sharp enough. Ethan trusted him, so Benji had to be.

“You knew the risks when you became a field agent,” Ethan said, a stubborn note in his voice. Then he hesitated. “You said it yourself.”

Benji smiled down at his hands, turned slightly to see that Ethan was watching him, and smiled at Ethan. “I did, yeah. Meant it, too.”

“All right, then. Looks like you're stuck with me.”

“Uh, I think I invited you. Little different. You may actually be stuck with me.”

Ethan pushed himself upright and tossed the duffle out of the way, sliding over to sit next to Benji with his knees drawn up. “I’m not sure either of us is enough of an expert in demonology to know what that means.”

“Well—“

“And unlike MI6, the IMF clearly didn’t want me knowing what I was at all.”

“What—“ Benji cleared his throat. “What do you suppose _that_ means?”

Ethan tilted his head back against the wall. “Not sure yet.” He turned just enough to regard Benji sidelong. “Any theories?”

Conscious that they were hurtling through the air in a US Military plane, Benji kept his voice down. “Well, I think that knowing exactly who and what you are can make a person dangerous.” He looked Ethan dead in the eye. They were back to their normal murky green, but when Ethan blinked, it was possible they flickered black. The light was dim and it was the middle of the night over the Atlantic. Difficult to say anything with any degree of certainty. “Especially a person like you.”

Ethan’s mouth twitched. For a long, fragile moment, his edges seemed to blur, and Benji caught the faint scent of clove cigarettes. He breathed it in and Ethan shivered, his knee tipping just enough to press against Benji’s.

They passed the rest of the flight in silence, though it wasn’t as if they needed to speak to be understood.


End file.
